Sample Chapter

Chapter One

England and New England, Common Ground

European settlement of New England began
not in 1620 when the Pilgrims dropped anchor
in Cape Cod Bay, but in 1607, the same year the
Jamestown Colony was established in Virginia.
The initial attempt at a permanent New England settlement-called
the North Virginia Company-took place at
Sagadahoc, Maine, on the inner coast north of what is now
Portland. There the climate was rigorous; winters were especially
difficult. The terrain was rocky, with plentiful bedrock
ledges, steep bluffs, stony soils, narrow marshes, and
streams. Everyone left within a year. The Sagadahoc settlement
had failed, perhaps because its landscape was too
cold and hard, too different from that of the mother country,
England.

The English returned to the region in 1620, landing
much farther to the south, near Plymouth, in what is now
southeastern Massachusetts. This group of religious dissidents,
later known as the Pilgrims, disembarked the
Mayflower to encounter terrain less rocky than that in
Maine and a climate less hostile to survival. Times were
hard, but the Pilgrims persisted. They proved that life
north of the Virginia colonies was possible, if only barely.

A decade later, the third English migration to New
England aimed for the middle ground between Sagadahoc
and Cape Cod. This group, which formed the Massachusetts
Bay Colony, struck near Boston, naming it after a village in
the old country. Unlike the adventurers and separatists who
preceded them, these Puritans were more typical of the
contemporary English middle class, being better educated,
involved in more skilled professions, and having come in
greater numbers primarily to escape religious intolerance.
Using maps made by Captain John Smith, they chose their
landfall near Boston wisely, founding what has since become
the economic and cultural center of New England.

The terrain near Boston was more yielding than that of
Maine, yet firmer than that of Plymouth, which was located
on the shore of Cape Cod Bay and had a greater abundance
of shifting, sandy, droughty soils. This middle ground
had wide, navigable, freshwater rivers; deep harbors; sheltered
bays; and stable shorelines. Broad salt marshes were
nurseries for fisheries and there were abundant freshwater
springs. Soils were fertile and loamy, yet light enough to
be grubbed free of roots and worked with handheld shovels
and hoes; this was especially true in places previously
cleared by the Woodland Indians for their crops of corn,
beans, and gourds. Marsh hay-a mixture of reeds, sedge,
and grass that grew naturally near high tide-was available
for cattle fodder, which was essential for survival.
Whitefish, alewives, lobsters, horseshoe crabs, kelp, and
whatever else washed ashore could fertilize cereal grains,
especially wheat and corn. The proximity to the sea moderated
the bitter cold of winter, and lessened summer
drought. The landscape was almost ideal. The climate,
though seasonally cold, was healthful.

Within a century, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had
become so successful that it expanded northward to engulf
the failed colony of Sagadahoc, and southward to include
Plymouth Plantation. The success of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony was due largely to the industry of its
inhabitants, who skillfully exploited the natural resources
along New England's inner coast, but also to the natural
affinity the English had for the land bordering the
Massachusetts Bay Colony. Indeed, the English felt at
home, naming their communities-Cambridge, Dartmouth,
Ipswich, and Dorchester-after similar places on
the other side of the Atlantic.

In fact, England and New England had similar landscapes
and climates because both lands had a similar geologic
history. Millions of years ago, in the Paleozoic era Old
World and New World, motherland and daughterland were
formed within the same mountain range near the center of
the ancient continent Pangaea. Ever since then, they have
been tied to the same geological fate.

To understand why the land of New England is so similar
to that of Old England, and how the similar fieldstones
on opposite sides of the Atlantic were created practically
within the same foundry, it is necessary to go back to the
inception of earthly time, 4.6 billion years ago. The story
that follows explains why there are so many stones, why
they are so widely distributed, and why they were perfectly
shaped for human handling.

* * *

To the Puritans, hell was a place of eternal damnation,
hot, dark, and sulfurous. However, in geologic terms, hell is
not a place but a time. The Hadean Eon, spanning the first
half billion years of Earth's history, was a protracted interval
of volcanic fury that took place while the planet was
still accumulating as a collection of fragments from asteroids
and comets, and dust and gas from exploded planets.

During the Hadean Eon (an eon is a span of time long
enough to hold eras and epochs), the heat released by intense
asteroid bombardment combined with the heat released
by radioactive decay to melt the planet. Molten lava
oozed up to the surface, forming a bubbling ocean of red-hot
liquid that quickly hardened into basalt, a black rock that
formed Earth's most primitive crust. Meanwhile, heavier
metallic components seeped downward, forming its core, a
mass of iron that is solid metal at the center but liquid in the
outer core. Earth's rotation (spinning more rapidly than
now) caused swirling motions within the outer core, which
produced the planet's magnetic field, and thus protected
the early Earth from the sun's intense ionizing radiation.

Between the Earth's core and its crust lies its mantle,
an enormous region of warm, dense, dark-greenish rock
that is solid, but malleable enough to flow and be
stretched. The continents are made of the lightest of
Earth's solid layers. From its hot, molten origin, Earth became
a solid but squishy glob of soft rock that rotated rapidly
on its tilted axis, perhaps up to five hundred days per
year, while wobbling like a top.

As Earth's interior melted, volatile gases boiled up and
created an atmosphere rich in noxious substances.
Nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor were heavy
enough to be retained by Earth's gravity, whereas lighter
gases such as helium were mostly lost to space. When the
atmosphere first formed, Earth's crust was as hot as a
broiler, prohibiting the condensation of the water at or
near its surface. Any drops that fell to the surface quickly
flashed to a cloud of steam, then back to vapor. Therefore,
all the Earth's water was held in high clouds so dense and
thick that they blocked out the sunlight completely.

At that point, Earth's lava surface was perpetually dark
and parching hot. What dim light there was came from
the orange-hot glow of flowing lava; the constant "heat"
lightning from distant clouds; and the yellow-green flashes
of meteorites, which until about 3.8 billion years ago
streaked through Earth's carbon-rich sky by the billions.

Eventually, the Earth cooled down. The shroud of vapor
condensed into mist, then mist to droplets, and
droplets became drops. Rain began to fall, not just for a
few hours or a few days, but for thousands of years, until
the original atmosphere had rained itself dry. Torrents of
water drenched the now solidified lava that covered the
entire planet. Rivulets of fresh water-not yet stained by
salts, clays, and dissolved organic compounds-flowed
noisily in the darkness, seeking the low places. First, pools
were formed, then ponds, lakes, and finally a global ocean.
Simultaneously, the sky gradually brightened, as though
part of a long, drawn-out dawn, thousands of years in the
making. One day, the first gleaming ray of sunlight broke
through the thinning clouds to strike an azure ocean so
young that it was not yet salty, and so expansive that hardly
any dry land existed.

As the Earth cooled further, lingering volcanism produced
masses of molten rock called magma that were
lighter in weight, lighter in color, and richer in silica than
Earth's earlier, heavier, more primitive magmas that produced
only basalt. These lighter-weight masses of molten
rock cooled to make lighter-colored rocks similar to granite,
which floated slightly higher above the mantle than
their basaltic counterparts. Over time, blotches of granite
crust coalesced like flotsam on a stream, fusing into proto-continents
that were light enough to float above the level
of the sea, thus making dry land.

At some point in Earth's cooling history, the outermost
fifty miles or so-equivalent to the thickness of the skin
on a peach-became a rigid shell called the lithosphere.
Because the lithosphere lay above a much thicker, softer,
still-swirling mantle, it broke up into giant tectonic plates,
which glided slowly over the surface, carrying the continents
along for the ride. No longer a hot, dark, crater-blemished,
quiet lump of debris gathered by gravity from
the solar system, Earth had been transformed into a machine,
powered by the heat from its interior, radiation from
the sun, and the angular momentum of its planetary spin.
The tectonic plates moved independently, like juggernauts,
making mountains where they collided, ocean
basins where they separated, and enormous valleys where
they slid against one another.

Earth's atmosphere traveled quickly over the oceans,
producing wind and waves, and the ocean's sluggish movement
over its crust produced tides and currents. Wind
storms, thunder, waves, torrents of running water, earthquakes,
and volcanic explosions were the sounds of
Earth's vital fluids moving about, yet there wasn't a single
creature alive to hear them.

Life began about four billion years ago, probably on
some hot, briny, pitch-black, undersea volcanic vent. From
that remote bacterial beginning, the evolution of life commenced.
For most of Earth history, however, life would remain
simple and confined beneath the sea. Only after
ninety percent of Earth history had passed would creatures
evolve legs and become strong enough to live on
land. It was during this life transition-from oceanic slime
to terrestrial animals-that the raw material for the stones
of New England began to form.

This inception took place in the Iapetos Ocean, the
precursor to the Atlantic, which occupied roughly the
same place; Iapetos was the mythological father of Atlas,
for whom the Atlantic is named. The Iapetos Ocean disappeared
as the ancient landmasses of Africa, Europe, and
North America converged upon each other during the formation
of Pangaea. The former ocean's water could easily
flow elsewhere on Earth. But the solid material that had
lain between the three continents-abyssal marine mud,
plankton oozes, volcanic islands, old shorelines, limy reefs,
small blocks of crust, and other earthly flotsam-was
scraped off the floor of the ocean and added to the edge of
North America, which at that time lay much farther south,
near the equator.

The culmination of this continent-to-continent collision
occurred about three hundred million years ago, shortly before
the dinosaurs began to rule the planet. Called the
Acadian Orogeny in New England and the Caledonian
Orogeny in Britain, it produced a mountain range that
traced a seam through the center of Pangaea, where the
continents had been stitched together. Indeed, the fjord-torn
mountains of Norway shared the same bedrock with
Greenland; the central Appalachians were attached to West
Africa. The lands in between-New England, maritime
Canada, and Britain-were pressed tightly together during
the three-way collision.

A small fragment of continental crust geologists call
Avalonia, caught up in this collision, has since broken into
separate pieces. One now lies beneath southeastern
England, another beneath southeastern New England. On
the other side of the collision lay what is called the
Greenville Terrane, which later broke up as well; its rocks
form the northwestern part of the British Isles, including
Scotland, and the northwestern edge of New England from
western Connecticut to western Maine. Most of what lies between-Ireland,
central England, and Wales on one side of
the Atlantic and most of central New England on the other-was
made from the mud and clay of the Iapetos Ocean.

Any land caught in the collision zone and squeezed
horizontally by the relentless tectonic stresses was also
thrust vertically upward, producing a mountain range so
massive that it couldn't be supported by the strength of
the Earth's crust alone. Hence, the vast bulk of the mountain
range, extending from Florida to northern Norway,
sank deeply into the softer mantle of the Earth, in places as
much as twenty miles. Essentially, only the upper part of
the mountain chain remained above the ocean while most
of it lay well below sea level, as though it were an enormous
stone iceberg. (Something similar is happening in
the Himalayas today, where the ongoing collision between
India and Asia has produced a range of mountains made by
materials scraped off the floor of a disappeared ocean. The
Himalayas above sea level today are but a small fraction of
their total mass underground.)

It was in the root of the "Acadian Mountains" whose
eroded stubs are now the northern Appalachians, that
New England's stones were created ten to twenty miles
straight down. A dry, hot milange of minerals baked slowly
within the Earth, at a depth more than five times that of
the deepest mine. Temperatures sometimes exceeded that
of flowing lava. Pressures were thousands of times greater
than those above ground. Briny waters were forced out of
pore spaces as they squeezed shut, carrying with them
gold, silver, mercury, and other precious metals dissolved
in boiling fluids. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and other
lighter, volatile elements that had originally been extracted
from the Earth's atmosphere by biological processes and
sunk to the ocean floor burned away and were vented
back to the skies. Primary rock-forming elements-silicon,
oxygen, aluminum, calcium, sodium, iron, potassium, magnesium-were
left behind and forced to recombine into
new minerals that were stable under these new conditions.
Clay cooked to mica, grit into quartz. Enormous
masses of rock the size of Rhode Island and rendered soft
by the heat stretched and bent like taffy, folding into each
other, miles below the surface.

Over time, the once mundane materials of the former
Iapetos Ocean-mud, muddy sand, sandy mud, sand-were
transformed into the beautiful banded rocks visible
over most of New England today. Some of these rocks are
layered like a cake. Others resemble succotash, with clots
of crystals.